


You Left the East Wind to Me

by Septembers_coda



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Supernatural (TV) Fusion, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Chuck Shurley is God, Dragons, Dungeons & Dragons References, Elves, Fantasy, Gen, Inspired by The Lord of the Rings, Magic, Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural), Mythology References, Paladins, Sam Winchester's Soul, Season/Series 15, The Lord of the Rings References, Wizards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:20:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26500528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Septembers_coda/pseuds/Septembers_coda
Summary: In another world, another Sam and Dean hold the answers to saving the universe from its own maddened Creator—aided by a beautiful, elven Castiel. Stanford scholar and hunter, meet wind wizard and dragon-slaying knight…
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	You Left the East Wind to Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brightly_lit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightly_lit/gifts).



> This takes place in the universe of Supernatural--I use Alternate Universe tags because Sam and Dean enter a different world, as happens in canon.
> 
> I drew from a few sources in and beyond Supernatural fandom, but my greatest influence was my favorite fic author brightly_lit, and most directly her story for _last_ year’s Summergen, Magical Me: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21161171 
> 
> I loved that fic, and the idea of Sam and Dean interacting with their alternate selves in a world of fantasy and magic, so much I never wanted it to end… so I wrote more of the same kind of thing myself, and I am endlessly grateful for the inspiration. Check it out it if you haven’t… it’s lovely, and genius, and I am so grateful it exists. This story could never have happened without it.

In a circle of wind and darkness, Sam waits. The answers will come. They cannot fight the pull of his magic, though they can, and do, fight _him,_ punishing his daring, lashing him fiercely with whips of gale that force him to his knees, then his belly, driving his face into the stone battlements, until he is crushed breathless when the words finally come.

When they do, so does despair.

* * *

Sam woke up, sweating, with a tremendous gasp that rasped his throat, after a dream he couldn’t quite remember. His heart was beating fast, but he was so used to constant terror, he couldn’t tell whether the dream had actually been frightening or not. With the world always about to end, fear had more or less stopped being effective years ago.

He yawned and glanced at the clock on his bedside table. No use getting up—there was nothing but the ever-present threat of the end of the world to worry about, and Dean was unlikely to be up for hours yet. So he stayed in bed and let his thoughts unspool, trying to remember the dream.

He couldn’t, and instead idly wondered if he still had a copy of the Lord of the Rings somewhere. There was a scene that was playing on repeat in the back of his mind; he wasn’t sure why. He had read the beloved favorite many times since that first time in the back seat of the Impala one blazing summer, sun so bright he squinted at the page, the hot highway wind carrying the smell of scorched asphalt through the rolled down windows, a few weeks after he turned eleven. But there were some mysteries in it he felt he had never quite solved. None that Tolkien intended, of course; with a couple hundred pages of appendices, the author clearly wanted to explain and explore everything, something the young scholar in Sam deeply appreciated. But no documentation written for adults of another country in the 1940s could explain the kinds of things a child wonders, even one like Sam, who read far beyond his age level, and assumed all of these things would be made clear when he was older.

Like that scene after Boromir’s death, when Aragorn and Legolas spontaneously made up carefully crafted, rhyming eulogy songs for Boromir and sang them on the spot. Admittedly Tolkien wasn’t a great poet, or at least Sam hadn’t thought so when he was young—he’d skimmed the longer poems, wanting to get back to the riveting story. But something had always stuck with him about that scene. 

He pulled a box of books out of the closet of his Bunker bedroom, favorites he’d been collecting whenever he had a chance to visit a used bookstore, and dug through it. There it was; the 1970s paperback boxed set. He pulled out The Two Towers and found the passage that had been tugging at his mind. After Aragorn and Legolas sang their eulogies about what they heard from the West, South, and North winds, Sam read:

_‘You left the East Wind to me,’ said Gimli, ‘but I will say naught of it.’_

_‘That is as it should be,’ said Aragorn. ‘In Minas Tirith they endure the East Wind, but they do not ask it for tidings.’_

Eleven-year-old Sam had been proud of himself for figuring out that that was because the East Wind blew from Mordor, and everything there was evil, so no one liked that wind or wanted to talk to it. But what had puzzled him was, did that mean they _did_ literally ask the other winds for news? And could the wind actually answer? In real life, in the past maybe, had people actually found out what was happening in other places from the wind? Or was it something magical that only people like elves and Númenórean kings could do?

Sam sighed and set the book down. If he had the headspace to wonder about the same fictional trifles that had stumped him at age eleven, he could make time to research killing God.

* * *

Sam was deep in a Men of Letters translation of a frustratingly vague Sumerian scroll when Dean emerged, following the smell of coffee.

“Hey, Nerd Boy,” he said, and tossed a book onto the stack at Sam’s elbow. “Remember this?”

The stack of books slid into collapse, spilling into Sam’s lap. He caught them and set them upright, shoving the scroll translation aside. He picked up the book Dean had tossed him and peered at the cover. A slow smile spread across his face. “Where did you find this?”

It was a classic edition Dungeons and Dragons book. The diagonal yellow stripe across the top left corner declared it Advanced D&D: the Monster Manual. Sam grinned at the late-70s art that graced its cover: the dragon in the sky above a club-wielding centaur and a unicorn, the underground showing less wholesome monsters. A hobgoblin and a bugbear, he thought, but he wasn’t sure about the tentacled tree-root creature. He remembered memorizing what each monster on the cover was, matching them to their descriptions inside, that summer in Pastor Jim’s church basement. 

“Dad’s lock-up,” answered Dean. “I brought back a box of old books last time I was there. Forgot about ’em until now. But I remember this one. You used to play with it, but I think Dad found some actual legit lore in there.”

Sam looked at the inside of the front cover and smiled again. There it was: the brand from the customizable stamp and ink pad Pastor Jim had let him take because the church wasn’t using it.

SAM WINCHESTER’S BOOK  
DEAN DON’T TAKE THIS 

He pointed at it, and Dean looked over his shoulder and laughed. “Yeah, I don’t know why you thought I would,” he said. “I wasn’t much into books around then.”

“Some of the female monsters were naked, so you were pretty interested, until you figured out where Dad stashed his Playboys.”

“Oh yeah. Succubus. Hot.” Dean joined him at the table, grinning reminiscently. “Remember that kid that went to Pastor Jim’s church that you used to play this with? Then he told you he couldn’t anymore, because his mom caught him.”

“Bradley. Yeah, whatever she said to him worked pretty well, because not only would he not play D&D anymore, he wanted me to swear not to, too, and get rid of the books. He was afraid I would go to hell.”

“Well, he was right,” said Dean, reaching across the table to clap him on the shoulder. “Though wrong about the reasons, cause I went first and I never played that game.”

“Yep, pretty sure poor old Bradley had no idea I was gonna actually become the Devil’s vessel and voluntarily jump into hell,” Sam said lightly.

“Or that the two of us would be trying to kill God a few years after that.”

“He probably didn’t see all the blood rituals and demon-alliances coming, either. Or maybe he did. His mom _really_ scared him about D&D.”

They both laughed, but sobered quickly. “Speaking of,” said Dean in a darker tone, gesturing to the pile of books he’d knocked over “anything useful here?”

“Not a thing,” said Sam ruefully. 

“We’ll find it,” Dean promised, but it was empty, and they both knew it. “Anyway, you haven’t tried the ol’ Monster Manual yet.” He tapped the cover of the book in Sam’s hands.

Sam smiled. “Was Deities and Demigods in that box? Maybe I should try that next.”

“Yeah, and maybe you should get back in practice with this stuff,” Dean answered. “We really need to roll a 20 on this one.”

* * *

Sam tossed and turned, troubled in his sleep. The wind had something to say. He should go up on the tower to hear it—but the last time it had woken him, it had nearly thrown him from the battlements, and if it didn’t kill him that way, it might kill him with despair.

No. It couldn’t all end yet. Sam was just coming into his power, just learning to speak the language of its deepest secrets. People came often to the keep to hear his predictions, to bring life back to the land through the words he gave them, and Dean’s sword had freed many a village from the terrors of dragons… Dragon Slayer and Wind Sage, paladin and wizard. They had faced greater threats than this one.

Hadn’t they?

Flames swept through his dream with the wind. Soon all would be ash, blackening the winds whose secrets no one was left to hear. Soon all would be lost, if the end could not be stopped.

The brothers. The mad brothers who would end the worlds. They sought a spell in an ancient archive, and what if they found it? What if Sam’s magic and Dean’s battle-strength were not enough this time?

They must undertake a journey as soon as the moon waned. If they would consent to hear him, Sam had to speak to the elves.

* * *

Sam woke again, smiling this time. He shook his head as he carefully picked up the Monster Manual from where it was splayed open on his chest, setting it on his bedside table. He’d fallen asleep reading much worse, scarier things, but this one, blending with his musings on the Lord of the Rings, had certainly painted a vivid dream-picture. He laughed softly. Dean as a Dragon Slayer. He should tell him; he’d love it. If only they did have elves to visit—magical, ancient people with all the answers…

Then again, they did have angels.

* * *

Cas strode into the Bunker to find Sam deep in a pile of books, Dean sipping coffee nearby and looking significantly less enthusiastic. He glanced up and said, “Cas. What do you know.”

There wasn’t much of a question there, but Cas answered it anyway. “A little something,” he said. Sam looked up and nodded at him, settling back to listen. “Angel radio has been silent for some time, as I told you, but this morning, there was a whisper on it. A buzzing of what you would call static, and then a name I have not heard in a long time.”

“Well?” asked Dean. “This a name we should know? Was there anything else?”

“Perhaps. And not much more. The name was Eurus. Greek mythology named her that. She was originally an angel, and we don’t like to talk about this, but… well, as you know, when angels seek power, it doesn’t usually end well. Eurus was one of these. She sought worship and became a sort of goddess, sometime around 1600 BC. The East Wind myths were convenient enough to insert herself into, and she enjoyed using wind power, so…”

The Winchesters were staring at Cas, riveted. He shrugged. “She was mischievous and wrought havoc here and there for some centuries, but she never made much of a mark. She picked the wrong wind to be associated with; worship of her never really caught on. She hasn’t really been heard from since well before the fall of Rome. I assumed she was dead—once committed to the path of being worshipped, if no one was calling on her name, she would fade away to nothing.”

“But she didn’t? You heard her name on angel radio?” Sam had an odd look on his face. Cas had come to recognize this expression, of an epiphany not quite ready to break through.

“Yes, though it came and went quickly. I heard ‘Eurus knows.’ That was all.”

“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything,” said Dean. “Maybe angels were just talking about the best celestial hangouts and they said Eurus was the one to ask. Knows all the party spots.”

Sam said nothing, frozen in that pre-epiphany state Cas was reluctant to interrupt. Nonetheless, he answered Dean. “There are no ‘celestial hangouts’,” he said, framing the words with finger quotes. “And if there were, I do not think Eurus would reappear after thousands of years to do a podcast on them.”

Dean grinned, eyebrows raised. “Look at you, knowing about podcasts like a feathery hipster,” he said, then frowned. “Are there angel podcasts?” he asked, somewhat seriously.

Cas frowned, but Sam interrupted. “Cas,” he said. “Did anyone—angels or anyone you know of—ever send messages via the wind?”

Cas scoffed softly as he sat down at the table. “Tornadoes, hurricanes, and tempests sent pretty clear messages when God was wrathful, at times. We angels were often sent to deliver these ‘messages’.”

“No, I mean…” Sam frowned, and shook his head as if to clear it. “Never mind. What do you think Eurus is up to?”

“Impossible to say,” Cas answered, “but I think perhaps I can find her, if indeed she’s in the world again.”

* * *

Sam was beginning to wonder if he was sick. He and Dean had been sleep-deprived so much of the time that he rarely thought about how much sleep he got, and as for being tired, that was just part of hunting. He’d learned to ignore it and down as much coffee as needed to keep him sharp on a hunt or get him through a night of research. But lately, it felt like sleep was always pulling at him, with an urgency he hadn’t felt since the days when Lucifer tormented him awake every time he fell asleep. Dean was out somewhere, and he was getting nowhere in his research, so he could find no real reason to resist. He stacked the books in front of him on the map table to a comfortable height and put his head down on them, closing his eyes.

He immediately fell into a dream so vivid that he knew this was not just a natural REM cycle. He was on a stone staircase that went up a mountainside, and the cold wind blew so hard he had to press himself against the wall to keep from falling. The air felt charged, electric, like lightning could strike at any moment. Bad place to be if it did, but the tower the stairs led to, an open-sided structure that looked something like a cross between a belfry and a lighthouse, was a worse place. He might hear thunder, but the wind was so loud in his ears he couldn’t be sure. The very mountain under his feet seemed to shake with it, and he felt it was screaming _at_ him, like… it expected a response? 

He should get down from this mountain before he fell off it, or got fried by lightning, but looking behind him, after a few steps down, the staircase disappeared in swirling darkness. A great, shrieking gust tore at Sam’s clothes and tumbled him close to the outer edge of the staircase, revealing a yawning chasm with only a knee-high lip of stone between him and it. He grabbed the edge of a step and crawled back to the wall, clinging on. There was nowhere to go but up.

He soon gave up standing and crawled up the steps, the wind tearing, shoving, and shouting at him, like a circle of bullies that had their victim cornered and would screech and spit and kick until a teacher came and made them stop… but no one could stop the wind. Closer to the top, he raised his head, and saw a figure framed in the tower, a man, he thought, wearing dark robes and clutching a staff. His long hair whipped in the wind, and he brandished the staff furiously. Sam could see that it had a split at its end, forming a crescent shape like a new moon lying on the back of its curve, and as the man held it higher, wind seemed to coalesce inside the crescent, a visible electric pulse, as he shouted words in a language Sam didn’t recognize. Sam could _see_ the wind respond, and felt it lessen around him as it gathered toward the figure’s staff, swirling into a miniature tornado that formed into a _voice,_ so loud it vibrated through Sam’s bones into the stone beneath him. 

The man cried out in response, looked around wildly, then looked at Sam, who was so shocked as their eyes met that he let go of the step he’d been desperately clinging to and slid backward on his belly down the stairs, scrabbling for purchase as the man ran to the top of the stairs and screamed, his voice carried on the wind: “Who _are_ you?”

As clouds whipped away from a bright, rising moon, Sam saw the face clear as day before he slid into rocky darkness: his own face.

* * *

Sam woke with a jerk after the sensation of falling, caught by his chair. The stack of books under his head collapsed as he jerked upright. As the surging adrenaline faded, he knew it was time to consult Dean and Cas about the dream—vision, he supposed.

He grabbed a notebook and quickly scribbled down as many details as he could remember, but this time, the dream was etched clearly in his memory. Just as he finished the notes, he heard a door shut, and Dean appeared, peering over the balcony. “Sam? We got a situation.”

Cas followed Dean down the stairs, and they joined Sam at the map table. “What is it?” Sam asked.

“Tornado passed through town and is headed straight for us.”

Sam blinked. They lived smack in the middle of tornado country; tornadoes had passed near them harmlessly several times. There wasn’t a safer place than their _underground bunker,_ so how was this a situation? 

Except… “It’s the wrong season,” he said.

“And it came out of nowhere, as far as we can tell. Cas and I got back just ahead of it. I went with him to check out an access point for angel radio he said was just north of town.”

“We did not hear anything,” Cas said. “The tornado appeared suddenly, but rather than out of nowhere, I would guess that it came from Eurus,” added Cas. “Tornadoes were Eurus’s favorite thing. It is possible that she sensed I was searching for her, and sent the tornado to discourage me.”

Dean was looking at Sam. “You don’t look too surprised,” he said.

Sam shook his head. “I don’t think she sent the tornado because of you, Cas. I think it was because of… us.” He glanced at Dean. “Maybe just me. I have to tell you guys something,” he said, “and then, I think I have to go talk to Eurus. If she’ll listen to me.”

Sam explained his dream in detail. “It wasn’t the first dream, but I can’t remember the others too well… in those, it was like I was getting someone else’s dream. That… other me, I guess. But it also felt like he was dreaming about us, and our world. It was like a house of mirrors. And I woke up thinking about a random scene from a book that I haven’t remembered in years.”

“What book? And when?” Dean said, too sharply for idle curiosity. 

“The Lord of the Rings, yesterday morning. Why?”

“Because I woke up that same day with a random urge to go look through the old books from Dad’s lock-up. And I felt satisfied when I found this—” he tapped the cover of the Monster Manual—“and gave it to you.”

Sam looked down at the book. He didn’t remember it being in the stack of books he’d been working with before his sudden urge to nap; it had been on his bedside table that morning. 

“Why?” continued Dean. “I never read that book, didn’t have any interest in the game. There are other books, actual lore books, in that box, but I never thought of looking in any of those…”

“This one, in a weird roundabout way, told us what we needed to know, I think,” said Sam.

“Which is?”

“That… there’s another me out there. In a different world. It wasn’t just symbolism. He asked who I was, so he could see me, too. I felt this really strong urge to go to sleep right then—I’ve felt that a few times recently. It wasn’t even really like falling asleep. I just closed my eyes and was pulled into this dream, and I was _there._ I felt the wind, the stairs bruising my knees, lightning in the air, everything.”

“Glad I wasn’t trying to kill you in this one,” said Dean darkly.

“Me too, but I think _I_ might have killed me if I could. The other me, I mean...” Sam trailed off, rubbing his temples. His head ached. 

“What do you know about this other you?” Dean asked.

“He’s a wizard—well, that’s what I would call him—who talks to the wind. He seemed—actually a little younger than me, but powerful. He reminded me of something, but I was too busy hanging on for my life to think what. Wizards, and magic that has to do with the wind, those are both related to the Lord of the Rings, especially that scene I kept thinking about.” 

He explained the scene briefly. “That is why you asked me if we ever sent messages via the wind,” said Cas. “Whether we ever did before, Eurus must be doing so now. Via the wind, and dreams.”

Sam stretched his neck, rubbing it with one hand, and with the other, he picked up the Monster Manual. “The D&D thing, too—when I played, wizard was my favorite character type. That connects to the other me, but I think there’s another you, too.” 

He nodded at Dean. “That would explain why you were attracted to the book, and found it in the box from Dad’s lock-up. You say you don’t remember any dreams, but your subconscious was still signaling you. There’s a dragon on the cover.” Sam tapped it. “In the dream I can’t remember much of… I heard something about a dragon slayer.”

“Psychic dreams—nah, those are your gig.” Dean gave a sardonic grin. “Dragon slayer, though, that does sound like me.” His smile died quickly as he studied Sam, who had gone silent, staring down at his hands. “What’s wrong?”

“Well… I’m just not sure we—our alternate selves, I mean—I’m not sure we’re on our side.”

In the uncertain silence that followed, even deep underground, they heard the roar of the wind.

* * *

Cas muttered something about trying to contact Eurus another way, to see if she could be placated. He disappeared into the bowels of the Bunker. Sam headed straight for the exit.

“Are you crazy?” Dean grabbed Sam’s arm, yanking him back from the stairs that led up to the outside. “You can’t go up there!”

“How else am I supposed to hear what she has to say? You heard what Cas said, about angel radio. Eurus knows.”

“And you heard what I said, that we don’t know what she knows, or if she wants to talk to you or scare you away. If you don’t think Wizard Sam or whoever is on our side, why do you think she is?”

“I don’t. But I want to find out what she keeps screaming at my subconscious about, regardless. Anyway, that tornado has got to be an F5 by the sound of it, and it’s hovering right above us. I don’t think it’s going anywhere until I hear her out.”

“How are you gonna keep from getting blown away?”

Sam tried to shout an answer over the increasing roar of wind outside the round, foot-thick steel door, when suddenly it banged open.

And the wind stopped.

“I was going to say,” said Sam, proceeding up the stairs as Dean released his arm in shock, “that if Eurus wants to talk to me, she’ll make it possible. Like putting us in the eye of the storm.”

It was very Wizard of Oz, or Twister, or something. A tangled spray of scattered straw and feathers, splintered wood, the bumper of a car, pieces of a barn, a huge tractor tire, and a whole chicken coop, complete with struggling chickens, were suspended in the slowly whirling air. 

Sam walked out into the strange, green-lit, muffled silence, peering into the maelstrom. Dean walked silently behind him.

“Eurus?”

A gust of wind ripped open the stillness, and a fence-rail blew directly at Sam. He leaped aside, staggering, but the wind deposited it harmlessly next to him. Sam stared at it, dazed.

“What did I say, Sam? Jesus, come back inside! I think that means she doesn’t want to talk!”

“Actually,” said Sam, picking up the fence rail, “I think it means she does.”

He held the rough wood aloft, struggling to balance it and ignoring the splinters that sliced at his hands. The rail was split at one end, forming a Y-shape—almost a crescent. As he balanced that end above him, the wind swept toward him, buffeting all around him like a dancer trying to tug a reluctant partner onto the floor. Sticks, dust, and leaves pelted his face. He closed his eyes against the onslaught, but shouted against the gale.

“Eurus! I’m here! I’m listening!”

The wind ebbed in Sam’s ears, but not in his sight. He could see it blowing up clouds of dirt, shoving Dean back against the door to the bunker, but silence stuffed his ears as storm clotted in the Y of the fence rail, until, crushingly loud as in his dream, it spoke—still in a language he didn’t know, but in his mind, the strange words folded themselves into ones he knew.

_Where blades till the wind to sow tame lightning  
A Way will open to the twinned soul  
He who must trade a favor for silver passage  
To the Moon, where peace may be mined._

* * *

Sam may have been tortured for uncounted decades in the bowels of Hell itself, but that didn’t make it much easier to tolerate digging a couple dozen splinters out of his own hands, while his older brother and an angel tried to interpret the divine “Google translate” verse his brain had spit out after a wind deity half-deafened him with it.

“A silver for passage reminds me of Charon,” said Cas. “Perhaps we have to offer Sam’s other self a danake to cross the Styx into the underworld. I might know where an authentic coin—”

“It’s not a silver _for_ passage, it’s a silver passage, like—”

“A plane?” said Dean, frowning. “Here, give me those. You’re doing it wrong.” He snatched the tweezers from Sam and grabbed his wrist.

“You’re an expert on splinters? _Ow._ I took them out for Dad starting when I was seven.”

“Well, I probably started pulling them outta him _and_ you when I was six, so I win. Hold still, you wuss.”

Sam grunted, gritting his teeth. “I was thinking a road of silver, or a passage to a silver place. No, not an airplane. Speaking of wusses.”

Dean gave him a quelling look and yanked out a particularly nasty splinter. Sam grunted again and shut his watering eyes. “Let’s go back to ‘until the wind sews lightning,’” said Dean. “Is that just poetry? Like, stiches of lightning in the sky in a storm?”

“No,” said Sam through his teeth. “It’s not sews like stitches, it’s S-O-W. Like seeds. I told you, I wrote down exactly what I heard. OH! I got it! A wind farm! ‘Blades till the wind’… and it ‘sows tame lightning’— that means, it makes electricity!”

“Of course!” said Cas. “Eurus could easily connect to such a place. So she could use the power of the wind there to open a portal to another world—the world where Sam’s other self, his twinned soul, lives.”

“If she can whip up an F5 tornado whenever she feels like it,” growled Dean, dumping whiskey from his flask on a sewing needle, which he then used to dig at a deeply embedded splinter in the pad of Sam’s thumb, “why the hell does she need a wind farm?”

“To focus her power,” Sam said. “Sure, she can whip up a tornado, but that’s something that already happens, where she just uses the existing potential. But now, she couldn’t even talk to me without help. Remind me to sand down that damn fencepost before the next time we talk to her.” He swore under his breath as Dean plied the tweezers again.

“The power required to open a portal between two worlds is far greater than even the force of a tornado,” said Cas. “Especially from the far side. I do not believe Eurus herself can travel freely to this world. I think this other world, the one Sam saw in his dream, is where she went when she disappeared in ancient times.”

“If she left in ancient times, how does she know about D&D?” asked Dean, dropping a final, large splinter into the old Men of Letters ash tray Sam was collecting them in. “All right, sissy, go wash your hands.”

On his way to the sink, Sam said, “The D&D might have been gathered from our subconscious, right, Cas? She prompts us, and our brains do the interpreting.” 

“Well, our brains are getting nowhere on the second half of this little poem, so, do we just head to the nearest wind farm?” said Dean.

“Once you cross over, if indeed Eurus opens a way, perhaps the rest of the verse will make sense, to your other selves if not to you,” said Cas. “I must remain behind, to guard the portal for your return.”

Dean poked at his phone. “There’s a wind farm less than an hour and a half from here,” said Dean, and smirked. “An hour, if I’m driving. OK, gear up. Let’s get this show on the silver road.”

* * *

The tornado had magically dissipated after Eurus delivered her message, the green light and hell-black clouds replaced by the usual thin sunlight and chilled-steel skies of late January. Dean steered carefully around the debris on the road for the first few miles. Sam was grateful to see that the tornado seemed to have missed Lebanon proper and mainly hit the open plains on the outskirts. He hoped that the denizens of the farms there had escaped with their lives, if not their homes. He comforted himself by looking up weather statistics and seeing that tornadoes in January, while very rare, had happened in his lifetime, so he hoped people weren’t caught entirely unaware.

They reached the wind farm close to sunset. The desolate prairie around it was stippled by the remnants of last year’s dead, yellow-grey cornstalks. The blades were turning gently in a cold, steady wind, and as they got closer they could hear the eerie, grating brush-thrum of the turbine, compressing, breaking, and compressing again the thick winter silence. Sam felt a viscous dread curdling in his belly as they approached, just as Dean said, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

Sam shrugged. He had a bad feeling about more or less everything they did, after all. “We gotta play it safe when we get through,” he said. “My other self is definitely not gonna trust us.”

“I’m more worried about Eurus,” said Dean.

“As am I,” added Cas. “She has never been evil, per se, but neither is she trustworthy. Unless she has changed in recent millennia, I begin to fear she is making this easy only because she has her own agenda.”

As the words left Cas’s mouth, the turbines abruptly halted, as if time had stopped—but the wind picked up, whistling around them to form a dust devil of shredded cornstalks that stopped directly in front of Cas, then blew _over_ him with a sharp whistle and collapsed, leaving Cas coughing, thickly coated with dirt and corn straw. 

All three of them froze as the gust died away, and the turbines began to move again. “Cas?” said Dean after a moment.

“She… spoke to me,” Cas said, wiping his face with the inside of his trench coat. “Rather, she transmitted… I don’t think she can speak directly, not without whatever power Sam connected to via the wind-staff, from the other world. It was angel radio, of a sort… but she—well. She disagrees with what I said.”

“At least now we know we’re in the right place. What did she say?” asked Sam.

“She said, ‘we must all seek accord.’”

“Glad she wants to get along,” said Dean dryly.

They all stood silent for a moment at the foot of gargantuan wind-turbine, which had begun turning slowly again, the sound thrumming through them. Sam looked at Dean, who gave him a speaking look back. 

“Well,” Sam said finally, moving closer to the base of the wind-turbine, “maybe I should have brought the fencepost, or another staff or something? What do we—”

His words were cut off as he casually laid his hand on the turbine. The wind gusted violently as a rumbling thrum assaulted their ears, the light dimmed, and with a sound like a foghorn, a great clot of cloud appeared in the sky in the Y formed by the blades of the turbine Sam touched. Lightning threaded through it, its ozone smell filling the air. Dust devils split off from it and fell to the ground, spinning all around them until they joined together and collapsed. In their place, a radiant thread framed an opening about a foot and a half wide in front of the turbine. Through it, Sam glimpsed a hallway of stone.

“This is it,” he said. “Ready?”

Dean was already moving forward. “Now or never,” he said. “Cas—whatever you can do to keep us from getting trapped over there. We’ll get back as soon as we figure out what we need there.”

“I will stand guard, but this is a surprisingly stable portal,” said Cas. “I hope you will have the time you need.”

With a nod, Sam turned sideways and stepped through, Dean close on his heels.

* * *

As he entered the portal, Sam felt the wind lift him, tossing him over an edge he couldn’t see. He dropped a foot or two and fell forward on his knees onto unforgiving stone. Behind him, he heard Dean staggering and swearing.

“Shhh,” he cautioned, finding his feet. 

Barely audible, Dean muttered “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” then went silent and they both crouched, looking around themselves.

They were in the open-sided tower at the top of the stone staircase from Sam’s vision, facing directly into the sunrise. Though the setting was a stark contrast to the storm-wracked night of his dream, he recognized all the other details, better than he thought possible from one view through the lens of his unconscious mind. He felt oddly as if he had known this place all his life.

He peered over the battlement wall and saw sharp stone crags all around, forested hills in the distance frosted gold by the dawn light. Turning, he felt the sense of familiarity surge as he looked down the stairs at what his dream had not shown him: the staircase wound around outcroppings of stone and ended in a magnificent castle built into the side of the mountain itself.

It was calm and silent, only a gentle breeze stirring the air as the light broke over their faces and stole down to the castle, lending it a gleam like fish’s scales. Dean broke the silence by swearing softly again. 

“We have to climb down all those?” he said, gesturing to the staircase that looked to be at least two hundred steps, with only a low lip along the outside edge.

Sam nodded grimly, moving toward it. “I’m more worried about our reception at the bottom. Hold the wall and go slow. If the wind picks up, it’ll be a problem.”

“Oh, then we’ll have a problem. How will we handle _that?”_ Dean groused, but followed Sam gamely, his eyes darting mistrustfully over the sharp crags below.

They made it down the stairs without incident. At the bottom was a sort of patio, with an archway at the far end opening onto a broad, roofed bridge that led to the highest turret of the castle. Before they could enter, Dean hissed and grabbed Sam’s sleeve. They hid themselves on either side of the archway as voices floated into hearing.

Familiar voices. 

“…still say you’re a terrible paladin.”

“A score or two of dead dragons say otherwise, brother. I’m the greatest paladin!”

Sam dared a peek around the outside edge of the archway. He could see under the roof of the bridge, and he suppressed a gasp as two figures came into view.

He saw himself. Dressed in a dark, greenish-gray robe as in his dream, with the hood thrown back to reveal waist-length hair, small braids threaded through loose tresses that were caught back from his face with a leather thong, thickly streaked with white despite framing a face that looked younger than Sam’s own. He was carrying the staff with the crescent at the top.

Next to him was, unquestionably, another Dean, also younger than the brother Sam knew. He wore polished, bronze-colored chainmail and a long sword was sheathed at his side. 

“Dead dragons don’t speak,” Sam heard as the pair moved closer. “And paladins are supposed to be virtuous.”

“I’m virtuous!” At Wizard Sam’s doubtful look, Knight Dean puffed out his chest. _“I,”_ he intoned emphatically, gesturing grandly down at himself, “am _virtuous.”_

“A score of lusty barmaids say otherwise, brother,” Sam answered dryly.

“Just because _you_ can’t appreciate a lusty barmaid—”

“Oh, _appreciate,_ is that what you’re calling it now?”

Sam felt a surge of panic. They were almost across the bridge, and he had no idea what they would do when they found _themselves._ He glanced across the archway at Dean, and saw the same shell-shocked uncertainty on his face. Then suddenly, they were out of time to decide what to do.

The pair emerged onto the patio, walking directly past Sam and Dean. Sam felt a strange sense of vertigo that intensified as Wizard Sam passed within two feet of him. He felt as if gravity could not hold him, and he suppressed a gasp and clung to the stone door lintel as he lost his balance.

Dimly, he saw the other Sam and Dean react the same way; Wizard Sam actually fell to his knees, then shouted, “He’s here, brother! On your guard!”

Sam was not quite sure what happened after that. The vertigo washed over him again, stronger this time, with a sound of wind. The light dimmed, and his head filled with a thick buzzing noise, like a beehive was lodged between his ears. He could not find his feet, or even his knees; he felt stone rise up to give him a hard welcome.

Distantly through the droning, he heard the thumps and grunts of a fist fight. “No!” Sam shouted, struggling to get up. “We’re not here to hurt you! We need your… help…” 

His voice weakened as he found he could not get enough air to shout. “Subdue him, brother!” he heard, then more curses and cries—two voices that sounded like Dean’s, and he could not tell which Dean was winning.

“Don’t make me do this,” said one of them. “I hate to damage such a pretty face, but…” Then a cry of pain, a loud thump, and silence, which might only have been in Sam’s head, tangling with the darkness that claimed him.

* * *

“Sam. Hey. Sam. Wake up.”

Dean’s voice was weary, repeating in a loop that no longer expected a response as he patted Sam’s face briskly. Instinctively, Sam brushed his hand away as he opened his eyes. “Dean?” he said foggily. He shook his head. Of course it was Dean, but was it the right one?

“You OK?” said Dean, helping him sit up, and as his face came into focus, Sam was relieved to see flannel plaid, short hair and crow’s feet appropriate to the age of his brother.

“Think so,” he answered. “What happened?”

“He—the other you—hit you with some kind of spell. A gust of wind from that staff you told us about. Then he tied me up with some sort of spell too, after the other _me _sucker-punched me and pinned my arms. Damn, that handsome bastard is strong.” He sounded vaguely proud, stretching his neck with a pained expression. As Sam’s eyes adjusted to the low light, he saw that the right side of Dean’s face was swollen and purplish.__

__“Thought he’d broken my jaw for a minute,” he continued. “Those metal gloves are worse than brass knuckles. They wouldn’t listen to anything I said, just ignored me, threw us in here and left. The magic ropes he used to tie me up dissolved after they locked the door. That was an hour and a half, maybe two hours ago.”_ _

__Sam grunted, sitting forward and taking stock of himself. His head was fuzzy, he felt sore all over like he’d been beaten, and was vaguely sick to his stomach, like a hangover. “Did you feel sick at first when they got close?” he asked._ _

__“Yeah, right before the other guy started swinging. I think he did too, and the other you. I don’t know, maybe it’s just weird looking at a you that’s clearly not you.”_ _

__They both sat silent for a minute as Sam looked around. They were in a classic dungeon cell—stone walls and close-set iron bars. Through the bars he could see a couple of torches set into brackets on the wall of the stone hallway outside. “Any chance of escape?”_ _

__“Nothing I can find yet. I checked the bars; they’re all tight and solid. I can reach the lock, sort of, but got nothing to pick it with, if that would work on this kind of lock. They took everything we had on us—that bastard-you hit us with a wind that pulled everything out of our pockets. Got my boot knife and everything. You got anything well hidden?”_ _

__Sam didn’t. He stood up to explore and found the stone ceiling was only inches above his head. There was a hole in the floor in the corner, presumably for use as a toilet. He knelt to look into it, but Dean said, “I tried that. I can’t reach the bottom, but it’s solid stone as far as I can feel, and you can see it’s too small to fit down. They left us water, but it’s in a wooden bucket, all one piece, no nails. No handle even.”_ _

__Sam finished his exploration and sat back down. His head was clearing a little, and he was dreadfully thirsty. He sat back down next to the bucket of water and sniffed it. “You tried this yet?”_ _

__“Not yet, but I’m getting pretty thirsty. I guess it wouldn’t make sense to poison it, when Gandalf-Sam could’ve just blown us straight off the cliff if he’d wanted to kill us.”_ _

__Sam smiled faintly over the rim of the bucket. “Gandalf, eh?” He sipped cautiously. It was clear and cool, tasting slightly of stone, like good well water. He drank deeper, and it cleared his head. As his thirst was soothed, his stomach rumbled loudly._ _

__“Wonder how long they’ll keep us here,” said Dean as Sam passed him the bucket, echoing the worries Sam’s stomach had awakened._ _

__“No telling. Like you said, they must not want to kill us, so I guess they’ll have to bring food sooner or later. If we could just explain… I mean, if I didn’t know about parallel universes—and how many people _would_ —if another version of me showed up, I would assume threat first thing, too.”_ _

__“Yeah, in that vision from Zachariah, Future Me knocked me out and cuffed me, too. Guess it’s our way in every universe.”_ _

__“How’d you get out of it?” Sam asked. Dean had explained the basics of his trip to a post-apocalyptic future, but had been vague on the details._ _

__“Pulled a nail out of the floor and unlocked the cuffs.”_ _

__“Ah, the old classic.” Sam sighed. “Well, in the absence of any nails, unless we get any bright ideas, I guess we wait it out.”_ _

__Dean sighed and, affecting an Inigo Montoya accent, said, “I hate waiting.”_ _

____

* * *

The Wind Sage set down the Listening Bowl as his brother walked into the library. “Learn anything of use?” Dean asked as he sat down.

“I’m not certain,” Sam answered, touching the surface of the enspelled water delicately. “Water magic is not my strength, but I hear them clearly enough. And their language is ours—there is just much they say that I do not understand. They call each other Sam and Dean, and show no signs of playacting when they do so. The one who looks like you even added a word I don’t know to my name, to distinguish which Sam he was talking about.”

“They’re older than us,” said Dean. “You noticed that?”

“Yes, and different from us in some other ways too. The other you looks to be a warrior of some kind, much as you are, but the other me shows no sign of knowing magic. In fact, they seemed astonishingly ignorant of everything about it. The one who looks like you was even impressed with my pickpocket spell, the most common and simple charm I use. With a bit of practice, _you_ could use that spell.”

“That _is_ a dunce’s charm, then,” Dean said, frowning. “But it could still be a ruse to make us relax our watch so they can strike hard.”

“True, but… they have not tried anything effective to escape. Between them, they investigated every inch of that cell, and discussed physical ways to escape that I would never have thought of, where a simple spell or two would have gotten them out of that cell, if not out of the castle. The one who looks like me did not detect the listening spell in the water, or the one on the lock. A simple cantrip would unlock the door if my spell had not sealed it, and would be the first thing any magic-user would try, but both of them just looked for something to pick the lock with.”

“Like _thieves?”_ said Dean incredulously.

“Even so. They seemed experienced at such methods. They even considered escape through the _privy_ hole.”

Dean snorted. “Wouldn’t you, if there was no other option?”

“There would _always_ be a better option.”

“Well, what else did they say? Anything about why they’re here?”

“No, but the one who looks like me wanted to explain it to us. He said he understood our suspicions and indicated that they have knowledge we have about… other versions of themselves. Ourselves? They mentioned future selves, even—not as I would speak of the future through the predictions of the wind, but as if they’d met themselves from a time yet to be. I know… it sounds like sheer madness. I didn’t understand it all clearly. But I begin to believe we should just talk to them.”

“Not yet,” said Dean. “Our position will strengthen if they are a bit desperate first. Let them cool their heels for a day or so, and see if they say anything more informative. I also don’t relish fighting them again. That sickly feeling is a handicap.”

“They felt it too, and perhaps more strongly than us. Though we have eaten since they came, and they have not. The other Sam seemed to feel better after he drank water.”

“If they drink it all, will the spell be gone?”

“No, it strengthens it. I will hear them better through the water in their bodies. But I think it’s time I sent them some food. As they seem to have recognized, I don’t wish to harm them if they don’t mean us ill.”

“I will finish cooking then, and we will see if the other me likes lamb stew as well as I do.”

“Send him some ale if you really wish to make a test,” said Sam, smirking.

Dean gave him a dignified look and said, “Dinner will be served shortly.”

* * *

Sam, listless and hungry, kept an indifferent watch while Dean napped restlessly. Dean had been afraid to sleep until Sam woke up, but nothing happened for hours and he was sore and worn out from his fight with himself, so Sam told him to get some rest.

Bored and tired himself, Sam was fighting to keep his eyes open when a gentle breeze touched his face. He sat up quickly. “Dean!” he said, hitting his arm to wake him. As Dean struggled upright, Sam pointed.

Near the door of the cell two wooden bowls had appeared in midair. Another draft stroked Sam’s face as they hovered closer, then settled gently to the floor in front of them.

Sam leaped up and rushed to the door of the cell, craning his neck in both directions. “No one there,” he reported.

“We got spoons, but they’re wood. Don’t know if we can do anything with them.”

“Let me try,” said Sam, and Dean handed him a wooden spoon. If the handle-end was narrow enough, he might be able to get it into the lock… but the spoon dissolved into air in his hand as soon as he thrust it outside the bars.

“Damn it!” said Sam.

“Yeah,” said Dean, picking up a bowl. “Now we’ll have to share a spoon.”

Defeated, Sam sighed and sat down next to the other bowl. It was full of some kind of stew, and still hot. A fragrant curl of steam came out of it as he sniffed it.

“This,” Dean mumbled around a full mouth, “is _delicious._ Man, the other me can cook.”

“How do you know he made it?”

“I’m me. I know,” said Dean, filling his mouth again and passing the spoon to Sam.

They traded bites for a minute, until another breeze blew into the cell and deposited two large wooden mugs. Dean immediately took a gulp of his and said “Ah! That’s the stuff.”

“Beer?”

“Ale, I think. It’s good.”

“Think they want to get us drunk?”

“It’s not strong enough, unless they roofied it. Don’t know why they would, unless they wanted us both to be asleep at once so they can try something, but I don’t even know what they’d try.”

“You go ahead. I’ll save mine just in case, so I can stay awake and keep watch.”

When they had finished eating, Sam roved around the cell again trying to see if anything could be done with the bowls and the remaining spoon to facilitate escape. He could find nothing. When he took Dean’s empty mug to fill it with water, he found that the bucket had been refilled. Seeing Dean eying his mug of ale, he grinned and said, “Knock yourself out. Then you get some more rest and I’ll wake you to watch when I get tired.”

Dean drank the other mug and went to sleep. Sam watched for some hours until Dean woke up of his own accord. Shortly after he woke, food was delivered again—porridge with some kind of fruit in it. The dirtied bowls and mugs had disappeared sometime before. They traded watches thusly twice more and ate a third meal, and nothing happened.

“Sam. What if Cas can’t keep the portal open this long? What if we’re trapped here so long there’s no world to go back to? We’ve gotta do something.”

Sam nodded grimly. “Have you gotten the feeling that they’re listening, somehow?”

“Sure, I would. I checked for anything that might be a bug, but how would I know what one would look like in this world? It would have to be magic instead of technology, and not any magic we know. There’s no hex bags, no sign of a cursed object or anything.”

“Well, maybe we’ll just… explain. If they can hear us maybe they’ll let us out.” 

Dean shrugged and made an “after you” gesture to Sam, who cleared his throat, looking around the cell.

“Hey,” he said. “Other… Sam and Dean, if those are your names. They’re ours. We didn’t come here to harm you, or anyone else. I know it’s hard to believe, but we’re from another world. We came here for help, to try to save not just our world, but probably this one too, and others. I know you saw me in a dream, in your tower where you talk to the wind... Well, I guess you were awake; _I_ was dreaming. I was never able to talk to the wind before, but I guess you, the… version of me in this world, can. And it told you about us?”

“She did,” said a voice, and Sam started violently while Dean cursed. Wizard Sam had appeared at the bars. There had been no sound warning of his approach. Sam looked at him, assaulted again by the strangeness of seeing himself, identical and yet so different.

Wizard Sam’s eyes flickered in the torchlight. He stared into Sam’s eyes for a long moment. “What she did was _warn_ me,” he said. “You’re… lying about who you are. You must be.” 

He sounded… young, Sam realized. As if he wanted to be confident, but the years had not given him the resolve of maturity. He reminded Sam of himself around the time Dean had come to Stanford to ask for his help finding their father.

“Did Eurus say we were lying?” Sam asked as gently as he could.

Wizard Sam started violently, jerking back from the bars. “You know her _name!_ And you _spoke_ it!” He sounded utterly scandalized, even frightened. He looked wildly around the dungeon, taking several steps in either direction with his arms raised as if he expected attack. “You fool! Don’t say it again. It is forbidden except from her one sacred sage, and then only at greatest need. Do not think you are safe from her wrath because we are underground.”

“No, we learned that lesson,” Sam answered. “OK! OK, I’m sorry, I won’t say it. It’s not forbidden where we come from, and she never heard me, until recently. When I started having the dreams that I think you had, too. I didn’t even know the wind ever spoke.”

“You must be lying,” Wizard Sam whispered, and he looked so vulnerable, it made his heart ache in a strange way, for himself.

“We’re not lying,” he said, trying to balance gentleness with the firm certainty he knew his young self would respond to. “And the wind doesn’t lie, does it? What did it tell you?”

Wizard Sam sighed, and leaned against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest. “I do not know what the wind is trying to say. I have only just begun to understand her. And I do not know what trickery this is, that you appear as me, and _you—”_ he nodded at Dean, “appear as my brother, but… but you are not. You look to be a man of middle years, while we—”

_“Middle years?!”_ Dean gasped, looking horrified. “Hey! You’re the one with all the white hair—”

“From using _magic,_ oozling!” For some reason, as the last phrase left his mouth, Wizard Sam clapped his hand over his mouth as if he’d accidentally said something terrible.

“I thought you only ever called _me_ an oozling,” said a mild voice, and Knight Dean appeared. Unlike his brother, Sam heard him coming.

Wizard Sam sighed. “I do,” he said. “But he just looks so much like you.”

“Really? I don’t see it.”

Sam laughed, shaking his head. It was crazy, seeing his mirror image bickering with that of his brother, exactly as the Winchesters had done their whole lives. 

The brothers outside the cell turned to him expectantly, but he couldn’t explain why he’d laughed. “I noticed I don’t feel sick being close to you anymore,” he said instead.

“Such pretty compliments,” said Knight Dean. 

“Brother, we can’t be hasty about this. The wind _warned_ me about them. It’s not yet clear—”

“All right, listen—” There was a confused silence as everyone realized both Deans had spoken the same words in the exact same moment. Sam felt a slight tinge of the earlier vertigo, Wizard Sam scowled, and Dean gestured to Knight Dean, as if to say “you first.”

“We aren’t going to leave you in that cell until the wind, or the elves, or whatever other blasted magical source gives my brother the assurance he needs. Even we might be graybeards if we wait so long; the two of you might be in your graves.”

“Hey!” said Dean, and Wizard Sam hissed, “Brother… I still sense that they are dangerous people.”

“So too are we,” said Knight Dean, pulling a set of keys from his pocket and locking Sam and Dean in a steely gaze through the doors. “Now, if at any time we decide you’re knaves,” he said as he unlocked the cell, “my brother can blast you with a more deathly spell than the one that subdued you earlier.” He nodded to Sam. “And as for you—” he nodded at Dean—“I bested you without even drawing my sword. If you act like guests, we will treat you as such.”

He was looking at Wizard Sam as he spoke. A separate conversation was happening in their glances, and Sam huffed a little laugh again at the eerie familiarity. 

“We will hear your tale,” said Wizard Sam at length. “But as my brother says, I can strike you down if you make one false move. The wind warned me of your coming. I do not take it lightly. I will not let you harm this world or its Creator.” 

“Follow me,” said Knight Dean, opening the cell door and starting down the hall, “and know that my brother’s staff is at your backs.”

He led Sam and Dean up another set of stone stairs and into a library. Wizard Sam instructed them to sit at a table there; he sat at the far end and watched them suspiciously. Sam laughed when he saw the table. It was huge, carved of dark hardwood inlaid with an old-fashioned map. In fact, despite its being basically a medieval castle, he’d noticed a few similarities in layout between this place and the bunker. He gazed longingly at the shelves of books and scrolls, wondering if he’d be able to read them.

“Before you tell your tale,” said Wizard Sam, “you will answer these questions. If I am satisfied by what you say, we will hear your plea.”

Dean shifted next to Sam; he could tell he didn’t like the word “plea”, but they were hardly in a position to use a less pathetic term. Wizard Sam went on.

“First, what is a Gandalf? What sort of spell is roofied? Who is Cas? And how did you make a passage to this world if you know so little of magic?”

Sam blinked at the seeming randomness of these questions, and Dean laughed. Then he realized that Wizard Sam must have heard their conversation, as he’d suspected. “Umm… Gandalf is a… not a real person, a fictional character that a lot of people know about. Dean called you Gandalf because Gandalf is a wizard. Is that what you are?”

“I am a Sage, but before that I was a wizard, yes.” Wizard Sam was stone-faced, waiting for Sam to continue.

Sam thought about the questions again. “Um, a roofie isn’t a spell, it’s a drug.” At Wizard Sam’s look of blank suspicion, he tried, “Like a mild poison, or an… herb, to make you sleepy and weak. We saw no reason why you’d do that with the water when you could just use magic.” 

“And when you’d already shown you could kick our asses. _This_ time,” said Dean.

The D&D brothers said nothing, just coolly waited for Sam to continue. He glanced at Dean and did so. “Cas is our friend. He has… magic, I guess you could call it, but not enough to open a portal to this world by himself. We borrowed some of your world’s magic, the wind’s magic, because she told us to. She told us—sort of, it was like a riddle—that the answer to saving our world is here, in yours.”

Both Wizard Sam and Knight Dean had gone completely expressionless. Neither said anything, seeming to wait for Sam to say something else. He could feel their distrust. Young as these versions of them were, they were still hardened, dangerous men in their own ways. Sam had come to think of them as harmless and naïve, which would serve neither party. He thought hard about what to say next as he mentally shuffled his strategy, but Dean spoke first.

“He’s an angel. Cas, that is. Castiel. Do you have angels in this world?”

The countenance of the other two shifted to even blanker ice, but beneath this, Sam sensed something like shock—almost panic. He spoke carefully into the frozen silence. “And Eur—the wind whose name I said. Cas knows her because she used to be an angel too. She left our world for this one, a very long time ago. That’s how she had a link to our—”

“Stop.” Wizard Sam stood up. “Say nothing more. My brother and I must speak.” As Knight Dean stood and followed him, Wizard Sam waved his hand behind him. A silvery net of light, sparking with flares of yellow here and there, appeared around them, a couple of feet from the table and all around it. “Stay here. Do not test these bonds. We will return soon.” They left, shutting the door of the library behind them.

Sam frowned down at the table, thinking carefully over the conversation, trying to suss out what had caused such an extreme reaction. His thoughts were soon derailed by a sizzling pop and a curse from Dean.

“OW! Fucking… son of a bitch!”

Sam looked up. Dean sat down hard, shaking his hands and stumbling back from the barrier, which pulsed a threatening darker yellow near him. His hair stood on end.

“You had to, didn’t you?”

Dean scowled at him, rubbing his arms and hands. “I’m getting pretty sick of their attitude,” he said darkly.

“Well, we’re kind of out of choices. What do you think freaked them out?”

“That we know angels, I think,” said Dean, trying to smooth down his wild, static-spiked hair. “I was watching them while you talked. It was important to them to know what Cas was, for some reason. That’s why I said it.”

They were both silent for a few minutes, thinking. There was no time for further conversation before the other brothers returned.

“We will hear your tale,” said Knight Dean as Wizard Sam waved his hand to dissolve the barrier. “But bear in mind that we can send you packing through your little elven-portal if you threaten any harm to our realm.”

* * *

Sam explained, as best he could, why they were there, and how Eurus had sent him dreams that indicated she wanted to cooperate in the matter of dealing with God. Wizard Sam kept peering at him with a strange expression on his face. Sam realized it must be bizarre to see your older self—a glimpse into an unfathomable possible future.

He covertly returned the glances, noticing the small differences between them apart from age. Even at Stanford, planning a safe life where his mind would be taxed more than his body, Sam had kept himself fit. He had always enjoyed running, and despite his resentment at having been forced to learn things like martial arts, he had kept practicing them, figuring it was good for his health as well as “just in case”. 

Wizard Sam was thinner than he’d been at that age, shallow-chested, a true beanpole. He had the posture of someone who had never thrown a punch in his life. There was an elegance to the way he moved—grace, but not much physical strength. Sam felt a strange pang for him. He could not say whether it was pity or envy. 

“So,” Wizard Sam said, when Sam had run out of explanations. “You _do_ wish to destroy the Creator. And you believe the wind is helping you to do so.” 

“We don’t want to destroy him,” Sam said quickly. “Not unless we had to. We just want to keep him from destroying _us,_ our world. And probably yours, too. If he’s not stopped, all the worlds will end.”

“Even the one that’s just squirrels,” said Dean dryly.

Both Sams shot him a look, but neither commented. 

At length, Wizard Sam said, “The word ‘angel’ is an ancient one few have ever spoken. We have heard it, but they are a myth of sorts. Cloud-beings who live on the Moons, it is said, and the few who believe they ever truly existed say they are many centuries gone. But we know Castiel. He is an elf, and his kind _do_ travel to the Moon, when it suits them. Specifically the Argent Moon.”

Wait—moons, plural? Sam thought. He had several questions, but Knight Dean was speaking before he could ask them.

“He owes my brother a favor,” he said. “Sam saved his life once, and cast a spell that destroyed the horde of demons invading the elves’ forest.”

“It was a spell I should not have been able to cast—it takes a lifetime’s power. It drained me dry and turned my hair white,” said Wizard Sam. “I was a broken thing, discarded and helpless. I knew I would never work magic again, if I chanced even to live. But the elves took us in and healed me, and Castiel gave me the power I hold now. That is how I came to be the Wind Sage.”

“The first in centuries,” said Knight Dean with a note of pride. He clapped his brother on the shoulder. “By far the youngest ever, and the first ever to have no elvish blood at all. Elves are the only ones who really understand the wind—when she uses words, they are of the elves’ language. They rarely concern themselves with humans, but they taught Sam the wind’s language, and now he makes predictions for people. They come to our keep for help with their troubles, and if they need the word of the wind they ask Sam; for a sword they ask me. Elves talk the same way the blasted wind does, in poetry and riddles. Enough to drive a man mad.” 

“Yet though I am the Wind Sage, I do not understand the wind’s role in this,” said Wizard Sam. “I had dark dreams of you, your search for magic your world does not possess. You would not find the spell in your fell library, so you would come here, the wind warned me.”

“Our library—the Men of Letters’ library isn’t fell,” Sam objected. “It was created to… fight evil. To protect the world from monsters. That’s what my brother and I do.”

“How do you know she was warning you against us?” said Dean. “Maybe she was telling you to help us.”

Wizard Sam stared at Dean for a long moment, his long, elegant fingers stroking his chin. His expression softened a bit, and Sam thought he understood why. It was easier looking at a different version of your brother, one that was much the same as the one you knew, than to see an odd, distorted version of yourself.

“Let me hear the verse again,” he said at length.

Sam repeated it:

_Where blades till the wind to sow tame lightning  
A Way will open to the twinned soul  
He who must trade a favor for silver passage  
To the Moon, where peace may be mined. _

Wizard Sam stared at him, but said nothing when he finished speaking and did not break his gaze. Nor did he blink, Sam realized after a moment. He drew his breath to speak, but Knight Dean dug him with an elbow, the same way his brother would, to silence him, then leaned close.

“When he does this, it’s because the wind is speaking to him,” he whispered. “Or something is; I’ve never been sure what. But they’re visions, or epiphanies—”

Wizard Sam blinked then, and turned to Sam as if no time had passed. “Isn’t there more?” he said.

“No,” said Sam, “that’s all of it.”

Wizard Sam frowned. “No it isn’t.”

“Umm…” Sam began, but Knight Dean elbowed him again and said loudly, “What’s the rest of it, brother?”

Wizard Sam’s eyes unfocused again and he said, dreamily,

_The touch of darkness leads to light  
In nothing, everything is learned.  
Emptiness holds no sleep and no waking  
but there at last, he will find rest. _

There was a silence, in which Wizard Sam looked a little dazed. Eventually, Knight Dean said, “Well, riddles are your bread and butter, not mine, brother. But perhaps I can read this one better now, in part. If the silver passage refers to the Argent Moon, I must guess that the emptiness where there is no sleep is the Empty Moon. It’s right there in the name.”

“I don’t like the sound of this ‘touch of darkness,’” said Dean. “We’ve been down that road before.”

“Did it ever lead to light?” asked Knight Dean dryly.

Sam and Dean looked at each other. Did it? Sam could only feel that this new line of the riddle was for him.

Wizard Sam seemed to come back to himself then. “We must contemplate the entire riddle further, but there is really only one place to look for answers to the most mystical questions.” 

He looked at Knight Dean the way Sam might look at Dean when telling him he had to get on an airplane, and Knight Dean sighed. “Yes. Time to cash in your favor with Castiel.”

“Yes, and send him to the Argent Moon. It takes great magic to reach there, a working of dozens or hundreds of elves, so it is very rare. I am not sure what they do on the Argent Moon—even from one such as me whom they call friend and Sage, they have jealously guarded secrets. Anything to do with the Moons most of all. They seem to regard it as a private matter of the spirit.”

“Ah, religion,” said Dean. “Making things hard on every world.”

Wizard Sam looked at him contemplatively. “Harder for those who know the Creator personally, I suppose. I still cannot credit it.”

“Trust me,” said Sam, “it’s hard for us to believe, too. It was easier when I could believe in a distant, all-powerful God who… I dunno; had a plan for our world? Rather than just enjoying watching us suffer.”

Dean nodded grimly, but both Wizard Sam and Knight Dean looked faintly shocked. No one spoke for a moment, until Sam said, “So this world really has three moons?”

“Yours _doesn’t?”_ said Wizard Sam incredulously.

“Nope. Just the one, and there’s nothing magical about it. Well… not directly,” he added, thinking of the spells and rituals he knew that depended on the phase of the moon.

“How do you divine the pure, the profane, and the balanced, then?” Wizard Sam asked. When Sam cocked his head and Dean said, “Huh?”, Wizard Sam went on.

“The Creator set the three moons in the sky to guide our steps, when we were born into this world,” he said. “The elves say they remember a time before the moons, and before humans, though not all the younger ones among them subscribe to this belief. The three moons are our moral guides, and much used for everyday divination. Folk commonly consult the power of the moon whose path they follow, though the moons do not answer exactly, unless one is a Moon Sage. My brother is a paladin of the Argent Moon, dedicated to the path of righteousness.”

“And _virtue,”_ said Knight Dean, with a pointed look. Wizard Sam ignored him, but a tiny smirk lingered on his face as he spoke.

“Our family has long followed the path of the Argent Moon,” he continued. “We have fought evil where we found it, hunting down and destroying the creatures of the Blood Moon and its human devotees, who are fortunately few. The demons who attacked the elvish stronghold were a cult of the Blood Moon.”

“Don’t forget the dragons,” said Knight Dean. “They’re hatched on the Blood Moon, but come to earth to satiate their hunger.”

“And you slay them,” said Dean. The tone of disbelief, Sam was sure, was mainly to cover up a mixture of pride and envy.

“To the gratitude of maidens across our land,” said Knight Dean smugly.

“Bet they don’t stay maidens for long,” muttered Dean. The two Deans grinned at each other, and Sam blinked, disconcerted by the twinned image.

“Your brother mentioned the third moon,” said Sam. “The Empty Moon?”

“Yes,” said Wizard Sam. “It has its devotees as well. It is dedicated to balance and neutrality. It is above us always, but it is rare to see it in the sky, for it absorbs or reflects neither light nor dark, but remains the color of the sky around it. Nothing lives there. Its magic is powerful, but it serves neither evil nor good; it may choose to align with either, as deemed necessary to achieve balance.”

“An unpleasant fence-sitting sort of creed, if you ask me,” said Knight Dean.

There was a short silence, until Wizard Sam cleared his throat and said, “If it needs to be said… we will help you. I am sorry we treated you ill, but nothing of this kind has ever happened before, and it is not uncommon for me to misunderstand the words of the wind, or need some time to unravel them. But I could not imagine how setting ourselves against the Creator could be a good idea.”

“It’s not a good idea, at all,” said Sam. “But we have no other choice. And thanks. For agreeing to help us.”

Wizard Sam nodded gravely, after a moment, Sam cleared his throat. “I hate to rush things… I wish we could just learn about each other’s worlds, and I’m dying to read some of these books.” He gestured at the shelves around them. 

“But we don’t know how long Cas can keep the portal open,” Dean said, “and we gotta get back to saving the world. So. Off to elf-land in the morning?”

Wizard Sam nodded. “We will leave at dawn.”

Sam remembered Frodo’s words to Gandalf upon deciding to leave the Shire at the beginning of the Lord of the Rings: ‘I am taking Sam to see the elves; he will be delighted.’

He shook his head. It all seemed so utterly surreal, but he hoped he would be.

* * *

They spent a much more comfortable night in the castle’s guest chambers while Knight Dean and Wizard Sam gathered supplies for their journey. A straw tick, as Dean grumbled, could not compete with Memory foam, but it was a lot better than a cold stone floor. Still, Sam slept poorly.

Here, away from the world he knew, he found his thoughts taking on different shapes than the ones he recognized. It was not quite like either waking or sleeping. He felt that he was pulling back the view so he could see the entire map of his life and his place in the world, but he could zoom in on the details to a minute level at the same time. All of his past was laid before him like an elaborate terrarium, a habitat for exotic snakes and lizards and other creatures, and he could take them out one at a time and speak to them if he chose…

A snake curled into his view, large and brittly shiny, its scales like tiny faceted black mirrors. It was so black it sucked in even the memory of light and made all colors seem weak and diluted, as if the entire spectrum was made up of this black’s lowly vassals.

Sam picked it up. It hissed softly, opening its mouth to reveal brilliant diamond fangs. It twined itself around Sam’s arm, then around his neck, curving its head back to stare into his eyes.

Sam looked back. The eyes were true mirrors. Sam could see more of himself than a mirror should be able to hold.

_In this world,_ said the snake, _I live. And we have yet to meet. His brother slays my disciples._

Silently, Sam struggled. The snake grew as it spoke, and now gripped Sam’s entire body in its coils, so he could not move at all. He knew he would come to no harm, yet this presence was one he _had_ to battle, to strive against. This fight was in his very bones. His blood.

His soul.

_I will live many ages longer,_ the snake said. _Father must be stopped. He will remember me. I will help you._

Sam fought harder as the snake squeezed him tighter, thrashing with every ounce of his will, trying to scream and finding his voice equally tightly bound, until one great, heaving contraction birthed him onto his straw tick in a flash of deeper darkness, and his breath screamed free with a shout of “Lucifer!”

Sam struggled upright as he woke, wildly scrabbling to light the oil lamp on the table next to his bed, but before he could, a cloud slid away from the window of his chamber and ushered in a flood of moonlight, revealing, on his pillow, a shiny, ruby-red apple.

* * *

Over breakfast in the castle’s library in the predawn, Sam explained his dream and Lucifer—the Winchesters’ experiences with him as well as his story in the Bible. Both Deans stared at the large, glossy apple, its red darker than blood, with sharp suspicion.

“The name, Lucifer, sounds familiar,” said Wizard Sam, looking longingly at the shelves of books as if he itched to research it right that moment. “But I am not sure where I have heard it. It must be connected to the Blood Moon. Disciples of a great serpent—I am sure that means dragons.”

“Eating an apple—does that mean anything in this world? Temptation?” asked Sam.

Wizard Sam shook his head. Knight Dean sat beside him, shifting restlessly in his chair and glaring at the apple.

“You are _not_ eating that,” said Dean.

“Of course not, not without testing it somehow, but we have to figure _something_ out. If it’s a message—”

They were interrupted by a loud _thunk._ Startled, Sam looked over to see Knight Dean with his sword drawn—and the apple in two halves on the table. Wizard Sam let out a long stream of medieval-sounding invective at his brother, but Sam saw something glinting in the apple, and picked up one of the halves.

Out of the apple’s bisected core spilled a key—mirror-black, like the snake’s scales. Its haft was the head of a snake.

Everyone fell silent.

Knight Dean nodded at Sam, as if this had answered a question he had, cleaned his sword off with a napkin, and sat down. “Well, he said, “suppose we find out what that opens. How’s that for a plan?”

Sam contemplated for a long moment. “The touch of darkness leads to light,” he murmured, gingerly picking up the key. “Whatever it opens… I think that’s our riddle’s answer.”

* * *

In the end, after all of them had inspected it closely and given their theories about what it could open, Wizard Sam conjured a chain and threaded it through the key so Sam could wear it around his neck, and said, “Unless we wished to stay here days more and look for clues in the library, I propose we go, and ask Castiel what he thinks when we find him. The elves may know.”

“Or they may not,” grumbled Knight Dean. “We can’t go to them with all of our problems, you know.”

“I rather think this is all part of the same problem, or puzzle,” said Wizard Sam. “And we have not the luxury of time to solve it ourselves at the moment. The portal that the wind opened may close again at any time. We will discuss it as we fly. Now, up to the wind house. We will take the wind carriage from there.”

“Wait a minute,” said Dean, eyes widening in alarm. “We’re going back up there? Wind carriage? Did you say we’re gonna _fly?”_

* * *

They were, in fact, going to fly. When they reached the “wind house” where Sam had first seen his other self in a dream, Wizard Sam planted his staff and called up a pair of mini-tornadoes, expressing about as much excitement as Sam might when starting a car. There were wind elementals, he explained casually, that would pull the wind carriage.

He climbed into the wind carriage, setting his staff into a bracket that held it in place next to the “driver’s seat,” and took the “reins”—lines of swirling air that snaked from the wind-elementals to his hands.

Wind elementals. This world had those, and multiple moons, and people who could go there, and magical versions of himself and his brother, and they were going to meet elves, beautiful, mysterious people who lived in an enchanted wonderland, like the places Sam had treasured in a secret part of his heart every day since he was eleven years old…

He realized something as he relaxed into the airy, slim-lined, sleigh-like conveyance that harnessed the wind, which in its utter fantastical strangeness somehow seemed completely normal to him. He felt as if this entire world, its magic dark and light, its nature familiar and alien, had been nestled inside him his entire life, like a small, quiet creature biding its time until it could emerge into light and unfold its wings.

Maybe he had been born into the wrong world, he reflected. Maybe he and Wizard Sam were like changelings whose worlds were swapped, and he, Sam Winchester, had never belonged in the mundane world at all, as he had always suspected.

The wound in his shoulder throbbed briefly. It did that sometimes, as if the wound were an entity somehow listening and responding to his thoughts. He massaged it, and paused as his wrist brushed the snake’s key.

The sense of holding an entire world inside him increased painfully. He had a wound from God, a key from the Devil, spells he’d learned from a witch, the advice and friendship of an angel, and he was currently riding the favor of a goddess of the wind. He’d slept in the arms of a demon, found his way to heaven and hell and into other worlds, and fought for or against forces of good, evil, and indifference, and why? What was inside him that any of these forces could _want?_ The key and the wound and the wind fought over the scraps of Sam until he wondered if he even existed in what was left.

* * *

They traveled for several hours that day. When they landed to camp for the night, Dean asked Wizard Sam why they couldn’t just keep flying all night until they reached the elves’ forest. Wizard Sam snapped that while the wind did not tire, he did. In fact, he looked almost transparent with fatigue as Knight Dean helped him out of the wind carriage, and he spread his cloak on the ground, lay down, and was asleep before the others even finished laying a fire and settling in.

Sam wondered if somehow, their shared… selfdom, or mirrored souls, made him feel what his doppelganger felt, for he felt far away, and he hardly heard anything that was said. Shortly, after eating a bit of something Knight Dean had roasted over the fire without really noticing what it was, he too lay down to sleep, listening to the weird twin resonances of two Dean voices.

Sometime later, the silence woke him. He was used to the deep, underground quiet of the Bunker, but the forest’s silence was different. It seemed to be listening for something.

He sat up. The camp was eerily still, bathed in moonlight, and Sam took in the three blanketed figures, the dim figure of the wind carriage beyond, standing sentinel at the edge of their camp, and the dying embers of the fire, before he saw the ghost.

That was what Sam was trained to see, and he groped for iron before he realized that, though the figure, sitting quietly next to the fire clad all in white, nearly glowed in the moonlight, it was solid, and the summer night had grown no colder around it.

It turned toward Sam, pushing a silvery curtain of hair away from its face with a slim, pale hand, revealing a delicately pointed ear. Startled, Sam realized he recognized the politely inquiring face.

“I hear you have a riddle for me,” Castiel said.

* * *

It was Castiel, yet not. The features were almost the same, just more sharply carved, infused with a strange, alien beauty, the waist-length hair silver-white instead of dark. He was somehow less human than Cas had been even at his most angelic.

The others had woken. Wizard Sam greeted this Castiel without surprise, and gave him the riddle. Dean stared at the elf, rubbing his eyes and blinking repeatedly, looking quizzically at Sam as if to ask “do you see what I see?”

Castiel received the news of two doppelgangers from another world with equanimity, as if he had expected it. He studied Sam closely when they were introduced, making no comment except to ask, mildly, “Do you hear the wind?”

Sam knew what he meant. “Um. Well, I did a couple of times, recently. Never before.”

“Tell him what else you heard,” said Wizard Sam, and when Sam looked at him blankly, Knight Dean added, “Show him the key.”

Sam brought it out, and haltingly explained his dream. Castiel did not touch the key, but peered closely at it. He still offered no interpretation of all they told him, but sat silently, contemplating. Out of the corner of his eye, Sam saw identical, impatient movements from both Deans. 

Wizard Sam sat cross-legged across from Castiel, similarly silent. At last he asked, “Do you know this figure from the dream, who appears as a snake?”

Castiel took a moment to answer. “Yes,” he said at last. “I know who he is, though none alive among the elves has ever met him. He was once one of us, but it was he who opened the way to the Blood Moon, and encouraged the propagation of evil creatures there.” He turned to Wizard Sam. “I received your message,” he said. “But I also heard the echo of you, before your message even reached me, and so I set off to find you all. I have done some research. The other worlds he spoke of—other selves and dimensions under the sway of the Creator—they are real. The elves remember them, from the time we were angels.”

“So it’s true. Angels are real, in our world.”

“It is not widely believed or remembered. I didn’t know it to be true, until I felt the echo of my other self, when these two came to this world and spoke of him.” He turned his disconcertingly bright eyes on Sam and Dean. “He is fallen?” he asked, without a trace of emotion.

Sam and Dean looked at each other. “I guess you could look at it that way,” said Dean gruffly. “But if he is, they all are. Whatever angels are left. Things… haven’t gone well for them in our world.”

Castiel merely nodded. He was staring contemplatively at the key, which Sam had set on his jacket on the ground near him.

“What does the key open?” Sam asked.

Castiel looked at him, his gaze uncomfortable, penetrating. “By itself, nothing,” he said. “With its other half that we must acquire…” He paused for a long moment. “A road to peace.”

He would say no more of the key or the riddle then, instead asking Sam and Dean detailed questions about the God of their world, angels, demons, and all of their dealings with them, drawing out the full story of every near-apocalypse the Winchesters had taken part in over the last decade or so. Dawn was growing in the sky before they finished talking.

“I’m sure this is all very interesting,” said Dean, yawning, “but we don’t know how long our Cas can hold open the portal to our world. We can’t get trapped here. What’s the plan? How do we stop Chuck?”

“We must send him where he cannot hear the prayers,” answered Cas. He stood, brushing dirt from his robes. “We must open a portal to the Argent Moon. Normally this is a great undertaking, but if the wind is on our side, I believe our combined powers will be enough. From there, I will retrieve the other half of the key.”

“And it will open a road to peace?” said Dean. “How?”

Castiel didn’t answer immediately. He was staring at Sam—straight at the wound below his collarbone from where he’d shot God. “May I see it?” he asked softly.

“See what?” said Dean gruffly, but Sam nodded, pulling down his collar and shrugging his shoulder out of his shirt. The wound throbbed, as if it wished not to be revealed. Cas reached forward and, with the lightest brush of a fingertip, touched it.

* * *

Sam woke to the smell of frying bacon. His eyelids felt too heavy to lift, stubbornly remaining closed as he absorbed other sounds—faint snatches of the kind of half-humming, half-singing sounds Dean made when he was cooking. They were away from the Bunker, he guessed—maybe a hotel room with a kitchenette? The bed felt typically lumpy beneath him, but he was comfortable—more comfortable than he could remember being in quite some time, his heart somehow eased of its burdens. When he woke up entirely, he’d have breakfast with Dean, something greasy and hot. He’d read the news on his phone, maybe casually look for a case, maybe not find one. Dean seemed in a good mood. Maybe they’d go catch a movie, take a nice long drive back to the Bunker, or even just chill out on a beach somewhere, if it wasn’t too cold…

Dean sounded in a _really_ good mood. He hummed like that, throwing in a few words here and there, when he didn’t know all the words to a song but felt like singing it anyway. Sam realized it was In a Gadda Da Vida, so he guessed there weren’t exactly more words than that…

But in fact, Dean was singing in _harmony._ With himself?

Finally, Sam opened his eyes. There was Dean, smiling, cooking bacon in an iron pan over a campfire. And next to him, adding a hummed line of harmony, was a younger Dean with long hair.

Memory came rushing back as Sam sat up. “What happened?” he asked.

“You’re awake,” said both Deans together. Sam frowned, holding his head.

His brother handed the cooking implement to Knight Dean and came over. “You OK?” he asked.

“Yeah, but… what happened?” he repeated. He looked around the camp site. It was the same one where Castiel had found them, and they’d talked, but then…

“What’s the last thing you remember?” 

“Talking to the Castiel of this world, answering his questions so he could try to solve the riddle…” Sam blinked, hard. Though he’d felt so comfortable moments before, his body now ached, as if he’d been lying in the same position for too long. “How did I get knocked out?”

Dean eyed him. “You don’t remember anything about… speaking in tongues?”

_“What?” ___

__“Yeah. As far as I can tell, it was Aramaic, or something close to it, but Castiel and the other Sam said it was ancient Elvish. They could understand you. Anyway. You told them what to do to solve the riddle. And channeled a bunch of power. Like, _a lot._ That’s why you passed out.”_ _

__Sam searched his memory, but found nothing. After a last image of Castiel’s face illuminated by the growing dawn, and the black key lying on his jacket between them, there was only a blank wall of susurrating mist in his mind._ _

__“How long ago was that? And… what power? The wind? And where did the other Sam and Castiel go?”_ _

__“Moon,” said Dean, sitting down cross-legged with a plate of bacon. When Sam gaped at him, he grinned. “Whatever mojo you kicked up with that vision was enough to create, I guess, a sort of… porta-portal. A big blob of power elf-Cas said would get him to the moon, but he needed to get closer first, so the other Sam flew him to some mountain top so he could go fetch your key.”_ _

__“What? They just left us here?”_ _

__“You get used to it,” said Knight Dean, sitting down beside them and handing Sam a plate of food. “You were in no condition to go anywhere, this one wouldn’t leave you,” he said, gesturing to Dean, “and I have enough experience to know I am of little use in matters of magic. And humans can’t go to the Argent Moon anyway—only elves. Castiel will go alone, and my brother will bring him back here.”_ _

__Sam shook his head. He was full of confusion… and he suddenly realized, ravenous hunger. He looked at his plate, frowning. The mass of fragrant meat didn’t look like bacon._ _

__“Dude,” said Dean, watching Sam notice the food, “I killed a _boar.” _____

____“With much of my help, it must be noted,” said Knight Dean._ _ _ _

____Dean ignored him. “That’s what you’re eating—closest thing to bacon I could get here. Still better than that garbage turkey bacon you like. Eat up. It’s been over a day since you ate anything.”_ _ _ _

____“You should drink some water, also,” said Knight Dean, handing him a wooden cup._ _ _ _

____It was strange to have _two_ copies of his brother taking care of him… but nice. “I’ve been out a whole day?” he asked, sipping water and trying a bite of the meat._ _ _ _

____“A little longer. It’s midmorning of the next day.”_ _ _ _

____Sam gradually pulled out details of his vison from the two Deans. Apparently he had told them, in Aramaic, how to find the key that matched the black one Lucifer had given him, on the Argent Moon. Castiel had pulled out a bit of parchment and drawn a map on it. Sam had said a lot of other things, too, which apparently told them what they needed to know to stop Chuck._ _ _ _

____“But they didn’t bother to explain that part before they flew off,” said Dean, scowling._ _ _ _

____“Elves never do. Like I said, you get used to it,” said Knight Dean. “My brother was too excited to see this new magic to explain anything, Castiel said time was of the essence, and off they went. He doesn’t know how long it will take him to find and dig up the key, which apparently is hidden below the surface of the moon, but he said we could look for them in a day or two.”_ _ _ _

____“I was hoping you’d remember what you said when you woke up,” said Dean._ _ _ _

____“No. I can’t remember a thing. But… it wasn’t Eurus?”_ _ _ _

____Knight Dean flinched, and Sam remembered he wasn’t supposed to say the name, but he brushed it off. “Not the wind, no. You channeled… light.”_ _ _ _

____“Lots of it. Castiel said something about the power of the Moon itself, which humans aren’t supposed to be able to use directly. The other you was super-jealous.”_ _ _ _

____Knight Dean laughed. “Rather less envious when you had a fit and collapsed,” he said. “Castiel assured us you would be well soon enough. The power just exhausted you. He awoke it when he touched the wound the Creator gave you.”_ _ _ _

____“I was ready to knock him on his ass when he touched you and you fell back and started streaming light,” said Dean. “But he was really surprised. Clearly not expecting that, so I figured he wasn’t trying to hurt you. Then you started talking.”_ _ _ _

____They were silent for a minute as Sam ate. Finally, Dean asked quietly, “You’re really OK? Feel normal and everything?”_ _ _ _

____“Yeah,” Sam answered. “I don’t remember anything after Castiel touched the wound. I didn’t even remember that until you told me.” He felt for the key. It was back on the chain around his neck. The wound throbbed when he touched it._ _ _ _

____“So you don’t know what we’re supposed to do with this key when we get it. And combine it with the other key—elf-Cas told us that much.”_ _ _ _

____“No, I have no idea,” said Sam, but as he pressed his fingers to the wound, he wondered if that were true. He wondered if, somewhere in the mists that clouded his memory, in dreams like the one where the Devil of this world had found him, he did know._ _ _ _

______ _ _

* * *

Late that night, as Sam was trying to fall asleep next to the dying campfire, Wizard Sam and Castiel returned. Castiel was so reticent about his journey to the Argent Moon that even Wizard Sam was annoyed.

“He came back to the wind carriage covered with moon dust,” he said to Sam, flicking some fine, silvery dust off of his own robes, “and just collapsed, much as you did after your vison. He woke up just before we reached here, and has answered none of my questions. The portal sort of… popped, the moment he fell out of it.”

“It was just enough power to send me back,” said Castiel, sitting down next to Sam, “with this.”

He opened his hand, and Sam gasped. The light that spilled from the key in his palm was so bright it flooded the campsite and penetrated the woods beyond; birds, startled awake, filled the trees with rustling and cheeping. But somehow the light did not hurt his eyes. It warmed him, and attracted him irresistibly. He had taken it from Castiel before he realized he had even reached out.

“Bring out the other key,” Castiel said softly.

Sam was already obeying. He felt a strange wrongness that brought back a vivid memory of being a very small child, the first time he had tried to press two magnets together. When he took the chain holding the black key from around his neck, the brittle-blackness fell into his hand, right against the white that was every color, that silenced the riot of every rainbow since the dawn of time in a beauty so intense that Sam’s eyes filled with tears, and the tears prismed into rainbows, and the consuming black splashed against the celestial white as the two keys, with a thrum that was not quite sound, nor light, nor any sensation Sam could name, fused together. 

The light from the white key streamed up the length of the chain, which lashed Sam’s arm like a whip, drawing blood. Sam cried out as darkness spilled from the black half of the fused key and… ate his blood, drawing it into the chain that had cut him. The chain looped itself around his wrist and formed a cuff of uniform iron-gray, like a shackle, threaded through a loop at the top of the key.

Darkness returned to the camp. No one spoke as the sounds of disturbed wildlife in the forest receded, and crickets began to chirp peacefully again. 

Dean broke Sam’s reverie by stumbling over to kneel at his side. “Hey,” he said hoarsely, picking up Sam’s arm. “Hey, are you OK?”

Sam stared at him. “Yeah,” he managed after a moment. “Yeah, I’m OK.”

Knight Dean made a torch from the embers of the campfire and held it up so they could examine the fused key and the cuff that held it close to Sam’s wrist. The wound the chain had made had disappeared.

The key, Sam realized, was a yin-yang. The snake’s head of the black key and the head of the white key, which Sam now realized resembled a dove’s, were pressed together as if in a kiss. The snake’s eye was now silver-white, the dove’s eye light-sucking black. The length of the key was perfectly balanced, half-white and half-black pressed together. A thinner ring of the gray material of the cuff pierced the key exactly between the two eyes and joined it to the cuff.

“You will not be able to remove it until its purpose is served,” said Castiel as Sam tested the cuff to see if he could slide his hand out.

“And what is its purpose?” said Sam. 

Castiel stared at him a long moment. “You will know when the time comes.”

“Damn it,” growled Dean, “enough with the mystical mystery game. We need answers. What do we do now?”

“Return home,” said Castiel.

* * *

Castiel returned with them to the castle on the mountainside. They drew the tale of his trip to the moon out of him as they rode in the wind-carriage. After intense questioning, elven mysticism and reticence aside, it was revealed that he really didn’t know how the Key of Accord worked.

“But if we do figure out what to do with it,” Sam asked, “what will happen?”

Castiel contemplated some moments before he answered. “There is an ancient myth that reflects much of what you have told me about our Creator’s aspect in your world,” he said. “It is very obscure, and in some circles, particularly among humans, it is considered blackest blasphemy to even tell the tale. Even among the elves, the factions who believe it to be a prophecy are little respected.”

“But you think it has the answers,” said Sam.

Castiel nodded. “In it, the Creator is world-weary and lonely. He creates a new type of being to entertain him, and sets them out among the stars, on many different worlds, to watch their lives unfold. He takes great joy in the pageant of their lives for a time. But these beings become aware of him, and plead with and harry him to fulfill their every wish and desire, and the suffering they insist upon plagues him. So he begins to snuff the worlds out one by one, like candles, seeking the peace of the darkness before he created them.”

Sam and Dean exchanged a grim look. “I don’t like where this is going,” said Dean. “It’s a little too familiar.”

“How do we stop him from snuffing out the worlds?” asked Sam.

“In the myth,” continued Cas, “there are two beings the Creator loves most to watch. Through many of their short lifetimes, he watches them die and be reborn over and over, hears their prayers and sometimes answers them. But at last he grows too weary to bear any more of their suffering. He decides to end it for them, but they rebel, and fight him with every power he has granted them, for the sake of story, over eons of reincarnation. They outgrow the story and become something of gods themselves, challenging his rule.”

“I don’t feel much like a god,” Dean muttered.

“Is that all there is to the story?” Sam asked.

“No. The beings of the Creator’s story vow to be kinder gods than the one who allowed them to suffer so terribly for mere entertainment. In the end, they decide that the answer is mortality. They reject godhood and its very nature, and seek to free the universe of its tyranny.”

“Free will,” Sam murmured. Dean shot him a look. “How do they make it happen?”

“Well, here the myth becomes hazy, and endings of the tale vary. Most involve some sort of trap or prison for the Creator. Some say the beings give the Creator a gem of such astonishing beauty that he cannot stop looking at it. And several of them mention the Creator being deaf to prayers.”

“Is there a key in any of them?” Sam asked.

“Not related to the Creator or his two favorite beings directly, that I have heard. Many of our legends do speak of the Key of Accord,” said Castiel. “I believe that is what we have made, that you now bear. It is considered an object of greatest, forbidden power, but no legend that I have ever read says exactly what it does, or connects it directly to the myth I have just told you. That is why I cannot advise you… but if you are the new gods of the myth, I believe that when you return to the world of your birth, your power will awaken, and you will know how to use it.”

“It won’t be the first time we’ve gone in on a wing and a prayer,” said Dean, and Castiel nodded solemnly, as if Dean had spoken some great philosophical truth.

* * *

It was hard to say goodbye, on both sides. Wizard Sam and Castiel spoke at length of the possibilities of opening another portal sometime, so that the brothers could visit again, but everyone agreed it was too dangerous for Wizard Sam and Knight Dean to follow the Winchesters into their world, with a great risk of being trapped there.

“If you do not succeed in your quest, we must take it up here,” said Castiel. “Though I believe you will, and we will know when you do.”

In his other self, Sam felt the reflection of his own longing for truth, knowledge of other worlds, and beauty that brings a sense of peace. Gazing out from the great “wind house” balcony etched into the mountainside, over the soft summer forests and misted green mountains of Wizard Sam’s world, Sam could hardly bear the thought of returning to smokestacks and traffic lights, disease and riots and monsters cloaked in industrial shadow, breathing in the choked air of his home.

Wizard Sam joined him at the balcony’s rail. “I should like to see your world,” he said, contradicting Sam’s thoughts.

“You’re not missing anything,” said Sam. “Your world is far more beautiful.”

Behind them, the two Deans were brawling—again. Knight Dean had given Dean a few sword lessons, but Dean, wanting a fight he could win, had challenged his doppelganger to a no armor, no weapons contest. Knight Dean might be younger and in great shape, but Dean had a few tricks up his sleeve, and wasn’t afraid to fight dirty. So far, it was a draw.

“You have not, perhaps, seen this world’s ugliness yet,” said Wizard Sam. “Are there not beauties in your world that this one doesn’t possess?”

Sam shrugged. As much as this world had that his soul had always longed for, he felt strange here, at odds with everyday life. He thought of cars, computers, modern medicine, and easy access to music and entertainment. He was starting to miss simple things, like a hot shower with good water pressure, electric lights, and Google. He might envy Wizard Sam’s castle and its view, its library full of arcane knowledge enough to fill his lifetime, but in his world, he carried a device in his pocket that could access anything from details about ancient Mesopotamians burial rites to Yelp reviews of the nearest pizza place with a few keystrokes. 

“Wonders,” he said at last. “My world has its wonders.”

Wizard Sam smiled, and clapped him on the shoulder. “May we meet again to rejoice in them, you and I.”

* * *

The time difference between worlds worked in their favor this time. Cas awaited them at the Kansas windfarm under gathering darkness only a few hours after they left.

Sam felt… too light, disoriented. His thoughts were hard to gather. The differences between the worlds were stark and strange. He was both homesick and glad to be home. He let Cas ride shotgun and lay down in the backseat of the Impala for the drive back to the Bunker, listening to the rise and fall of Dean’s voice telling the story, laced with the occasional low murmur of Cas’s questions. They always came back to _how._ How, again, would they stop the end of the world? The other Castiel had said that they would know. This Cas only looked at Sam quizzically, questioning his silence with eyes that looked all too human now, whatever celestial light Sam had once seen there dulled to almost nothing.

But, he reflected as he fell asleep to the comforting whoosh of tires on the highway, the scent and feel of old vinyl under his cheek, maybe that light was in him now. Maybe it always had been.

Crossing back to their world had tired them both. When they reached the Bunker, they agreed to sleep on it and see if they had any fresh ideas for stopping Chuck in the morning. After taking full advantage of hot water and good water pressure, Sam crawled into bed and fell instantly, heavily asleep.

* * *

After so long under alien skies with three moons, sleeping in elvish forests and magical castles, it felt natural to follow the sound of guitar down a neon-lit alley into a dim bar, to take his seat next to God.

Chuck didn’t look up as Sam came in. He played a large, round-bellied acoustic guitar, old polished wood shining in the lamplight. Sam knew little about guitar, but he thought this sounded classical, almost like a Renaissance lute. Chuck was finger-picking instead of strumming, and the words he sang in an uncommonly gentle, melodious refrain were in Latin.

_Dona nobis pacem,_ he sang, over and over like a tender, twining breeze. Give us peace.

“Heya, Sammy,” he said, as the song concluded. “Is it time to wrap this thing up?”

“Think so,” said Sam. He pulled a beer from the green cooler between them and handed it to Chuck, who set the guitar aside and cracked it open.

“Not how I planned on ending it,” he said. “I had good intentions at the beginning, you know. The best. It was supposed to be… beautiful.”

“It is beautiful. And nobody ever said it had to end,” Sam answered. He cracked open another beer for himself, and sipped it.

“Can it really be this easy?”

“In what of the billion worlds you created would this ever be called easy, Chuck?”

Chuck smiled. “You came to get me, Sam. You and Dean. I knew you would.”

“No man left behind,” said Sam, and clinked his bottle with God’s.

* * *

Sam woke, full of a feeling he would normally call dread, but he found it was infused with longing, and… joy? Anticipation? It was a restless feeling, fluttering against his ribs like a dozen caged crows, and it needed an answer. The key felt ice-cold against his wrist, spreading numbness up his arm to where the wound in his shoulder throbbed hot, heat and cold wrapping around his torso and fighting for control of his blood.

He rose and dressed in a trance, and found himself behind the wheel of the Impala. It was dead night and artic-cold, the nadir of the year. The moonlit fields that lined the highway were dead and empty, all life sleeping beneath the frozen earth. Leaving the lights of towns behind, Sam drove without any idea of where he was going, until he did know.

He pulled up to the desolate, once-white clapboard church where he’d once watched the meteor trails of thousands of angels falling. Its single spire pierced the sky with dullness, and deep silence wrapped Sam the moment he killed the engine. He stumbled inside and knelt before the ruined altar.

Broken moonlight splintered on the rotted floorboards. Turgid darkness swelled to meet it. They fought each other, fought for the world, fought inside Sam, and their screeching voices and frozen silence deafened him, Lucifer’s sleep-stealing mockery, God’s madness, divine voices and all the times he’d been saved, but he did not want to be saved. He should have stayed in the fire. He should have spilled the last of his blood, closed the gates, died with his mother, died with Jessica, died with Dean a thousand times. He should have taken the black hand that was extended to him. He should have taken the warm, living hand. He should have flown to the other side of the world, lived in a swirl of sun and water and peace, the peace of the grave. He should walk into, away from, the light, the darkness…

He could not remember how to pray. God was not God. This was not a holy place, because there were no holy places. The agony of lost faith burned him, and he cried out at the pain—pain in the God-wound, pain in his tormented, razed, and imperfectly reconstructed soul, pain in his existence in this world.

His wrist where the key lay against his skin was a bone-drenching cold, the searing heat of the God wound boiled the flesh of his chest near his shoulder, and suddenly, he raised his arm and drove the cold into the heat, piercing his chest with the key. It slashed him, cold and heat swirling out to devour him and rend every bit of his flesh and his mind and his soul, hollowing him out and eating hollowness until he was empty, empty, empty at last.

* * *

The moon was blue-black-silver against the night sky. Stars sparkled around it and in it. Below him, and above him, and around and inside him, was a deep blue nothing, singing of nothing, garlanded with silver and black stillness, blessed and restful as the deepest slumber, but his eyes were wide open.

He remembered this place. He remembered the legend of an empty place, a haven of silence. He had forgotten, but it had not forgotten him. There was nothing here, not even darkness.

Then, he saw. He saw everything.

He saw the end and the middle of every story. He saw the silence before the word, the song before the silence, the anguish of loss and the burgeoning beauty of hope, lost and regained, birth and death repeated over and over, and he could not touch, could not harm, could not hear, and could not answer. No one would ever find him here, and he would find no one. 

In nothing, everything is learned.

He turned his head and saw a thousand worlds, looked down and saw infinity more, and knew that they were his, and would never be his, and his heart stilled to blissful silence at last. He searched and searched through all the worlds, through heartbreaking beauty and velvet-deep darkness and forests of mediocrity and madness, until he saw two ordinary brothers on an ordinary world, and heard their voices, and settled in to watch, full of emptiness and love.

* * *

Sam was aware of warmth, and comfort. The evenness of the bed beneath him, the smoothness of the sheets, the heavy snugness of blankets piled high over him slowly stole over him, along with awareness of home.

Hadn’t he just been far from home, and terribly cold?

“He’s awake.”

It was Cas’s voice, sounding oddly human and rough. Then, “Hey, Rip Van Winkle. ‘Bout time you stopped growing that beard and got off your ass.”

The room came into focus—his room in the Bunker, with Dean and Cas sitting on either side of his bed. Sam couldn’t find his voice. Cas urged him to sit up and gave him water to drink.

“You all right?” asked Dean gruffly. When Sam didn’t answer right away, he continued, “You did it, you know. Saved the world. Or actually, the universe this time, I guess.”

“What happened?”

“We were kind of hoping you could fill in the blanks. Well, maybe after some food.” 

Cas brought over a tray with a bowl of soup on it, while Dean helped Sam sit up. Sam found he was able to manage the spoon well enough, so he ate while Dean talked. 

“Far as we can tell, you drove to that old church and stabbed yourself in the God-wound with the Key of Accord. You got yourself good; there was a lot of blood. I don’t mind telling ya you scared me, Sammy. Next time you want to change the fabric of existence, bring me along, OK?”

Sam smiled faintly. It was good to see Dean and hear his voice, but he could not form the dozens of questions he had into words. Memory stirred sluggishly, of the other world, his other self, and weirdly, he thought he’d been on the moon… 

When Sam didn’t say anything, Dean continued. “You almost died of hypothermia before we found you, and then you wouldn’t wake up.”

“How long was I out?”

“Six days. This is the seventh. I was about ready to take you to the hospital, but you know how that is. They can’t do much about the kinds of stuff we get into. Cas was talking to other angels, trying to find answers.”

“Angel radio is extremely active suddenly,” said Cas, “but no one on this side knows what happened. We all feel it, but cannot explain it.”

“Feel what?” Sam asked.

“It is hard to explain, but… the absence of God is the best way to describe it, I suppose. It is like he was a blade poised above our necks, and that is gone, but belief in him, in his goodness and rightness, has increased vastly. In humans, too, and even demons seem to be affected, though we don’t know much about that yet. Faith…” He paused, looking down at Sam, and Sam blinked, seeing the elven Castiel’s face over the more familiar one for a moment. “I don’t know, Sam, because I don’t know exactly what you did.”

“Yeah, like I said, I was really hoping you could give us some solid intel,” added Dean, “but I can tell you, monster activity is way down, too. I called every hunter we know, and they all say the creep-o-meter is down near zero right now. I wanna know how you pulled that off.”

“I don’t know,” said Sam. Memories were returning in wispy threads that were hard to grasp. “But I think it was Chuck, not me. Or… what he’s _not _doing. I saw him…” Or was him? “on the Empty Moon, I think.”__

__Cas nodded. “I think you’re right. I believe that moon of the other world is a place of his own making, intended as a retreat for him, or a place of… exile, should he choose a wrong path and wish to start over. It’s almost as if he set a trap for his future self, millennia ago.”_ _

__Sam just looked at Cas. He looked… different. More like the angel Sam first met over a decade ago than the increasingly human person he had come to know._ _

__Cas looked back at him solemnly, then continued. “Dean told me everything about your visit to the old world, and it triggered… well, I suppose you would call it ancient angelic memory. The story was familiar.”_ _

__“Does it have a happy ending?” Dean asked._ _

__Sam looked at Dean now. He looked… older, and tired, but more at peace than Sam could ever remember, and Sam had the strongest urge to see him on a warm beach somewhere, charming women and drinking fruity cocktails and saying nothing for weeks on end about blood, death, or monsters._ _

__Cas regarded them both. “You know,” he said with a slow smile. “I think it actually does.”_ _

____

* * *

****

Epilogue

Returning to the Bunker after over 15 years was like waking up from a dream—the most pleasant dream, surely, any Winchester had ever had.

Dean kicked a trail in the dust of the entryway. “You sure you need to come back here?” he said. “We sold off enough old artifacts to set us up pretty comfortably. It’s gonna pay for my kids’ college, for sure.”

“Yeah,” said Sam absently. “I’m not looking for more things to sell. I just… felt something call.”

“Maybe you should have sent one of the younger hunters—if there still are any,” he said. “I’m getting too old to answer that type of call.”

“Me too, but I think it’s different from that. We’ll see.”

Dean followed him into the old library. Sam walked to the shelves, perused for a moment, then pulled out a book. Even Dean saw its faint glow, which lit Sam’s sudden smile of understanding. He pulled down the collar of his shirt and pressed the open book to the old scar, silver white in the shape of a yin-yang below his collarbone.

A high wind swept through the room, and as Sam set the book on the floor, a pool of silver light spread up from it, resolving into a doorway through the bookcase. Dean laughed—a sound of pure wonder and joy that Sam heard much more often these days—as someone familiar stepped through.

The laughter was twinned as Knight Dean, younger than his Winchester counterpart but maturing handsomely, stepped forward and clapped Dean on the back. “Good to see me,” he said.

“He’s been planning that quip for years,” said another familiar voice, and Wizard Sam stepped out of the portal. 

His hair was pure silver now, and lines around his eyes and mouth spoke of the years that had passed for him, more perhaps than on Sam’s side. An ache of something he had long missed eased in Sam’s heart, and he clasped the white-robed shoulder.

Wizard Sam looked around himself and met Sam’s eyes with a mischievous smile.

“I believe you promised me wonders,” he said.

**Author's Note:**

> The first half of this fic was written for 2020 Summergen, and then abandoned when it diverged too far from the prompt and kept getting longer and more complex. It ended up being an exploration, through Sam’s character, of themes that have resonated for me my whole life: belonging in a different world, a love of fantasy and especially the Lord of the Rings, a sense of deeply instilled grief for the dissolution of a faith, finding deeper truths irrespective of religion, and understanding the realities of the life that we’re given versus the life we might feel we were meant to have.
> 
> Also, _elves._ ;-)
> 
> I toyed with the idea of posting this as a Lord of the Rings crossover. I elected not to since the story doesn't exactly treat LOTR as "real" and none of its characters appear except as references. But it contains many of those, including the title which is a quite from The Two Towers. The alternate world and its race of elves was strongly influenced by Tolkien. I hope both LOTR and Supernatural fans will enjoy it.


End file.
